One of the features of Fedora 17 is the /usr merge, put
forward by Harald Hoyer and Kay Sievers[1]. In the time since this
feature has been proposed repetitive discussions took place all over the various
Free Software communities, and usually the same questions were asked: what the reasons
behind this feature were, and whether it makes sense to adopt the same scheme for
distribution XYZ, too.

Especially in the Non-Fedora world it appears to be socially unacceptable to
actually have a look at the Fedora feature page
(where many of the questions are already brought up and answered) which is very unfortunate. To
improve the situation I spent some time today to summarize the reasons for the
/usr merge independently. I'd hence like to direct you to this new page I put
up which tries to summarize the reasons for this, with an emphasis on the
compatibility point of view:

Note that even though this page is in the systemd wiki, what it covers is
mostly orthogonal to systemd. systemd supports both systems with a merged /usr
and with a split /usr, and the /usr merge should be interesting for non-systemd
distributions as well.

Primarily I put this together to have a nice place to point all those folks
who continue to write me annoyed emails, even though I am actually not even
working on all of this...

Enjoy the read!

Footnotes:

[1] And not actually by me, I am just a supportive spectator and am
not doing any work on it. Unfortunately some tech press folks created the false
impression I was behind this. But credit where credit is due, this is all
Harald's and Kay's work.